Films about banking

Why did appointed officials of the Australian Reserve Bank and its employees break sanctions in Iraq and cosy up to Saddam Hussein through a frontman during the late 1990s, early 2000s and beyond? Why did a former Deputy Governor and other directors hand-picked by the Reserve Bank to safeguard its subsidiary companies from corruption, end up–over a decade–overseeing some of the most corrupt business practices possible? How did they allow millions of dollars to be wired to third parties in foreign countries–including a known arms dealer–in order to win banknote contracts knowingly using bribery and supporting corruption?

For more than two years the Eurozone has teetered on the edge of an economic precipice. But how exactly did it get into the current financial mess? Talking to historians, economists and politicians, The Great Euro Crash takes a long view of the euro–from Churchill’s vision of a United States of Europe; to the bail-outs of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Meeting a property developer in Ireland, a taxi driver in Rome and a German manufacturing worker; the film exposes the high cost being paid by European workers today for the dream of monetary union–and how close the entire European Union came to a complete banking meltdown. The crisis could yet claim another victim–Britain, with its vast financial sector, would be dragged down by the collapse of the euro. The cost for saving the euro may be high, but the alternative would be a return to the economic mayhem of the 1930s…

The Tax Free Tour travels the globe to expose the workings of offshore tax havens and the elite banking systems of the world’s billionaires which operate in extreme secrecy. Using examples from multi-national corporations such as Apple Computer and Starbucks, the film traces sizeable capital streams that travel the world literally in milliseconds–all to avoid local laws and paying tax. Such routes go by resounding names like ‘Cayman Special’, ‘Double Irish’, and ‘Dutch Sandwich’. The Tax Free Tour is a sobering look at how the world’s rich live in an entirely different world than the rest of us…

With the recent global financial crisis, governments across the world promised decisive action — the biggest financial stimulus packages in history, along with gargantuan bail-outs of corporations and floods of money into private banks and investment firms. But what crazed logic is this: propping up bad debt with…more bad debt? Overdose reviews the happenings of the bail-outs over these years, showing how dangerous the situation continues as a burst bubble is re-inflated globally. What happens next?

Over six desperate days in October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed leading to the collapse of three thousand banks, taking people’s savings with them. In a matter of days, the United States economy was obliterated. The crash was followed by a devastating worldwide depression that lasted until the Second World War. Finances did not regain their pre-crash values until 1954. This film recounts the story of a financial disaster that we hoped could never happen again, revealing the familiar tune of cheap credit, consumerism, greed, corruption and cronyism in the current-day financial crisis…

There are plenty of anarchists in the world. Many have committed robbery or smuggling for their cause. Fewer have discussed strategies with Che Guevara or saved the skin of Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Black Panthers. There is only one who has done all that, and also brought to its knees the most powerful bank in the world by forging travellers cheques, without missing a single day of work bricklaying. He is Lucio Urtubia from a tiny village in Navarra in North of Spain. Lucio, 75, now lives in Paris, still doing valued political work. Lucio has been protagonist and witness to many of the historic events of the second half of the 20th century. His family was persecuted by Franco’s regime; he was on the streets of Paris for the phenomenon of May of 1968; he actively supported Castro’s revolution; and helped thousands of exiled people by providing false documents to them. But without a doubt, his greatest triumph came in the second half of the 1970s where he swindled 25 million dollars from the First National Bank–or Citibank–to later invest the money in causes he believed in.

Let’s Make Money investigates the development of the world-wide financial system, showing that elitists economically exploit the rest of society, especially in the developing world, but also in western nations. Using the savings of a typical depositor as a case study, the film moves around the global system, showing exploitation at many levels. There are several interviews with investment managers, politicians, economists as well as homeless people and workers who give their take on the system and its impacts…

Catastroïka follows the global trend of privatisations in the past two decades, extrapolating the forthcoming results of the current sell-off in Greece, which has been demanded in order to face the country’s enormous debts. Turning to the examples of London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Rome, Catastroïka predicts what will happen, if the model imposed in these areas is imported in a country under international financial tutelage…

Inside Job provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted government and academia…

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a presentation by John Perkins, based on the book by the same name published by him in 2004. Perkins provides an account of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston and how that before his employment with that firm, he was interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency, detailing later that this interview effectively constituted an ‘independent screening’ which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described economic hit-man…

John Pilger examines the policy of western banks making loans with third world countries, which are then unable to meet the crippling interest charges — debt is a weapon. It also analyses ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’, which are proclaimed to enable countries to compete in the global economy, but have the opposite effect of lowering wages which in turn further transfers the wealth from the poor to the rich…

“In the late 1990s, the Reserve Bank of Australia thought it was on a winner. The bank had developed the technology to create revolutionary polymer bank notes. The Reserve decided to set up a subsidiary company called Securency, that it would part-own with private interests, to sell the technology to the world. It had just one problem — getting access to other central bank officials to pitch the idea. So, instead of making bank-to-bank representations, Securency decided to employ middle-men to make ‘connections’ with relevant officials”…

The 2008 ‘financial crisis’ was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars all over the world. No one was jailed for this massive crime, the largest theft of public money in history. Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their ‘crisis’ through punitive ‘austerity’ programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights. Capitalism Is The Crisis shows this very nature of the global economy, visits the protests against it, revealing revolutionary paths for the future. Special attention is devoted to the situation in Greece, the 2010 G20 Summit protest in Toronto, Canada, and the remarkable surge of solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin…

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” By providing a simple introduction to the concept of exponential growth and doubling over time, Professor Al Bartlett explains the impacts and consequences of exponential growth on a finite planet. Observations of this growth are applied to fossil fuel consumption, population and economic growth — the bizarre unsustainable figures of which are most often quoted by “experts”, politicians and the mainstream media…

We have not just been living through a global recession, but what amounts to the largest coordinated, economic crime in recent history. Now, having barely survived a complete collapse of the financial system, the global economy is tottering on the brink. We’ve reached the limits of what our desires demand of the planet and what it can deliver. But, by looking to past failed civilisations, can we learn what not to do with our future? Like the ancient Mayans, we’re reaching peak everything — oil, land, population, climate, food and water and the question is whether we can manage the change. But as we embark on a quest for re-building a sustainable economy and a sustainable planet, is this crisis the wake-up call we desperately need to have? Do we need to turn eco-warriors into eco-capitalists and launch the next great bubble — a Green Bubble?

In September 2008 when the American economy was on the verge of melting down, the then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, his former protégé John Thain (CEO of Merrill Lynch), and Ken Lewis (CEO, President, and Chairman of the Bank of America) secretly cut a deal to merge Bank of America and Merrill Lynch — in the midst of stock collapse; a rocky merger; the worst fourth-quarter losses in at least 17 years; a stockholder revolt and an urgent need to raise more capital despite a $45 billion “bail-out” from the federal government…

The Chicago Sessions explores the ethical implications of the financial crisis during three sessions with a group of law and philosophy students. The grounds of the University of Chicago provide a compelling arena, since it is here that both economist Milton Friedman—staunch promoter of free market capitalism—and Barack Obama, lectured. Examples of crisis related issues discussed during the sessions are: mortgage lending practices, foreclosures, bail outs and CEO pay. The students will test their ideas both on eminent professors and on field experts. The discussion is fueled and illustrated by case stories that the students themselves provide. The cases show how the financial crisis really affects the people of Chicago and in one example shows the consequences of the foreclosures in a neighborhood not far from the university and Barack Obama’s home.

For millions of people, the global economic collapse has generated a thirst for knowledge about how money systems really work, especially when so many financial pundits seem to be equally baffled. In The Ascent of Money, economist, author and historian Niall Ferguson offers insight into these questions by taking viewers step-by-step through the milestones of the financial history that created today’s money system, visiting the locations where key events took place and poring over actual ledgers and documents—such as the first publicly traded share of a company—that would change human history. The Ascent of Money shows how the history of money is indeed at the core of civilisation, with economic strength determining political dominance, wars fought to create wealth and individual financial barons determining the fates of millions.

25 Million Pounds details the collapse of Barings Bank in the mid 1990s — one of the oldest and most prestigious merchant banks in Britain, run by the same family for decades with extensive ties to Britain’s elites…

Money is a new form of slavery and is only distinguishable from the old slavery simply by the fact that it is impersonal–that there is no human relation between master and slave. Debt in government, corporate and household has reached astronomical proportions. Where does all this money come from? How could there be that much money to lend? The answer is that there isn’t…

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